View by Day

We look forward to meeting the 2016/17 cohort of new Graduate Teaching Fellows as we gather in Prague to prepare for the new academic year.

The new Fellows will be teaching Economics across the Central/Eastern European region. Their courses are targeted primarily at first and second year students of Economics, and are aimed to provide new levels of excellence in both content and delivery.

The Teaching Principles and Practices course provides opportunities for Fellows to practice and discuss fresh, effective teaching methods, and to collaborate with established Fellows and Economics Faculty members on content and delivery. Another focus is to build ongoing connections between Fellows and CERGE-EI and other participating institutions.

Past evaluations by students and institutions indicate that CERGE-EI Teaching Fellows bring positive change and modernization to Economics education in the region.  We’re sure that this year’s cohort will continue the tradition, and will uphold the CERGE-EI Teaching Fellows standard of excellence in Economics Education in their home countries!

We welcome this year's new cohort of Career Integration Fellows! These recent PhD graduates with degrees from Western universities are aiming to contribute their much-needed cutting-edge knowledge and fresh, effective teaching techniques to Economics education in the CEE and fSU regions. Their modern approach and knowledge is greatly needed and much appreciated.

The course offers Fellows opportunities to learn more about the program and resources offered by CERGE-EI. Fellows will also contribute to discussions on a range of important topics, including comparisons of teaching in the west and the CEE, and teaching in an internet world. There will also be a focus on building and maintaining connections between Fellows, CERGE-EI, and the Teaching Fellows community.

The program’s funding has been substantially expanded again this year in response to the outstanding reviews it has received from institutions and students in past years. Each Fellow is truly important to Economics education, and will leave positive footprints that will influence the region for years to come!

Dissertation Committee:
Michal Bauer (chair)
Karna Basu
Randall K. Filer
Peter Katuščák

Abstract:

In the first chapter, I examine the effect of scarcity on sharing norms and preferences. Sharing provides one of few sources of insurance in poor communities. It gains prominence during adverse shocks, often largely aggregate, when it is also costliest for individuals to share. Yet it is little understood how scarcity affects individual willingness to share and willingness to enforce sharing from others, an important ingredient in sustaining prosocial behavior. This is what this paper examines. I conduct repeated within-subject lab-in-the-field experiments among Afghan subsistence farmers during a lean and a post-harvest season of relative plenty. These farmers experience seasonal scarcities annually. Using dictator and third party punishment games I separate individual sharing behavior from the enforcement of sharing norms. While sharing exhibits a high degree of temporal stability at both the aggregate, and, to a large extent, the individual level, the enforcement of sharing norms is substantially weaker during the lean season. The findings suggest that farmers are capable of sustaining mutual sharing through transitory periods of scarcity. It remains an open question whether exposure to unexpected shocks or prolonged periods of scarcity might result in the breakdown of prosociality due to loosened sharing norms enforcement on a community level.

In the second chapter, we study how the availability and use of a specific formal institution-- a financial sanction -- affects trust, trustworthiness, and moral intentions towards co-ethnics and non-co-ethnics using an economic experiment run with 420 adult males from peri-urban areas in Afghanistan. In contrast to previous studies on the behavioral effects of financial incentives, our subjects have little experience with formal institutions. We use a trust game with a requested back-transfer in which the investor can choose to impose a financial sanction for non-compliance. The sanction is costly to the trustee but cost-less to the investor. While sanctioning  increases back-transfers in cross-ethnic pairs, it does not in co-ethnic pairs. Our results suggest that financial sanctions may crowd out moral incentives more strongly among one's own group, but have a much smaller behavioral effect when applied to individuals from a different ethnic group. The results have important implications for understanding how formal institutions affect  cooperation in ethnically heterogeneous settings.

In the third chapter, we integrate tools to monitor information acquisition in field experiments on discrimination and examine whether gaps arise already when decision-makers choose the effort level for reading an application. In both of the countries we study, negatively stereotyped minority names reduce employers' effort to inspect resumes. In contrast, minority names increase information acquisition in the rental housing market. Both results are consistent with a model of endogenous allocation of costly attention, which magnifies the role of prior beliefs and preferences beyond the one considered in standard models of discrimination. The findings have implications for the magnitude of discrimination, returns to human capital and policy.

Full Text: “Essays in Behavioral and Development Economics” by Vojtěch Bartoš